The door was so small, I wondered if I could squeeze through. Well, let’s see, I thought. I’m a lot thinner than I was a year ago. Maybe now I can get through that blasted door, the door I’ve been avoiding for so many years. Before the doorway was so small that I knew there was no way I could get through and now – now there’s hope. Shall I give it a try or shall I just walk by that door of opportunity once again? I see that cute little girl taunting me, smiling and hopping up and down on one foot. She’s got long, long reddish blonde hair and now she’s waving at me. “Dare you to come through the door!” she shouts.
She dared me, darn it. Did that little girl just dare me? At first I wondered who she was. She’s not any of my kids, of course. Oh yeah, of course. I know that girl. “You come back here. You’re supposed to be hangin’ with me!” I shouted to her.
“Try and catch me if you can!” the girl yelled, her long hair bobbing up and down, her little pixie face all crinkled in a big smile.
But there’s no way I’m as fast as that precocious little girl. I would never be able to catch her. She’s off and at it again. She’s my muse and she’s run away through the small door that I can’t squeeze through and I’ve gotta catch her if I can. I haven’t even tried to squeeze through the door in a long time. It’s bright and sunny over there on the other side and the grass at the park is a deep green – back when they’d run the sprinklers in…in…where the heck is she anyway? Is that Golden Gate Park? Yes, it’s gotta be. Yes, it is. That little girl, my muse, stepped away from the doorway and I couldn’t see her.
“Hey, where’d you go? You come back here!” I yelled. Suddenly, the young girl ran by the doorway, taunting me yet again.
“Well, come and get me. C’mon. What are you so afraid of?” She stood still for a moment, watching me, looking so cute in her turquoise bell bottom pants and striped blue and white t-shirt to match. For a moment I loved her as much as I loved my own kids…even though she was a very bad little girl for not listening to me.
What was I afraid of? I mean, it was a small door, but I should be able to squeeze through it. I might have to bend down and heave myself through, but why not?
“Okay, okay, I’m coming after you. I ran over to the small child-sized door and pushed myself through. It was a tight fit, and for a moment I thought I’d be stuck like Winnie the Pooh was when he tried to get down the rabbit hole. But I squeezed some more, and…and…oh it feels so tight, I thought, so tight, but I think I’m gonna make it.
“Aha!” I burst out into the other side, where the sun was shining down on the Greens, a small triangular shaped meadow in Golden Gate Park where I played as a kid. And there she was, that little muse of mine smiling up at me.
“See, it wasn’t that bad, was it? I knew you could do it!”
She grabbed my hand and we skipped through the grass and my knees didn’t even ache.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
A Small Door - Jackie Davis-Martin
In the dream the door, like the others, opened into a shed of sorts, a small room filled with ice and snow. That was at first. When she returned (and who knew why she was returning?) she felt she should clear them. She had a shovel. The first room, the first shed that is, was satisfying in that she scooped up the slush and tossed it outside, exposing the wooden floor, making it useable she remembered thinking although as I write this I’m not sure what it was useable for. Heartened, she moved to the next room, with her shovel. These rooms were separate entities, separated, accessible by a step or two, but the next room had had its sludgy ice, its frozen mounds, now transformed to small sculptures of ice which hung by red threads or ribbons. Strange she hadn’t noticed that before, had thought the ice was all of one piece, but it wasn’t; it was of discrete sculptures, maybe angels, maybe birds, so jammed together they appeared at first to be one ice cluster. She reached for a small, narrow bird—or angel-- on its red streamer and put it in her purse. Maybe it would last; maybe it would be glass when she looked at it again.
How would she reach her mother? How would she let her know that there would be someone waiting to pick her up in the ice and snow so the woman wouldn’t be anxious? The phone number was back at the house, back at a house, maybe hers, and she didn’t have a copy of it, nor any way of returning in the snow, which was thick, but pleasant, too, really. Her mother was part of some shared-number cooperative and there was no way of calling and asking about it either. Well, they would be there. She and someone else, a man.
The third door was open as she approached, blocked by a great wedge of ribbed ice, as though a cascade of water had tumbled upon itself and froze just like that. She slid her shovel, a shovel now flat and silver and sleek as the spatula I use for getting salmon off the grill—only larger, of course—under the great wedge and moved it, in its completeness, out of the doorway. The window in the room also had a frozen overspill, much like a window box hanging into the room, thick with frozen symmetrical modules, and at first she turned the shovel over to perhaps hack at it, to knock it down and push it from the room, but then she noticed the beauty of the ice here, too, too beautiful to push aside, to destroy. She’d leave it that way, although god knows how they’d manage around it. Maybe others would admire it, too. She marveled that she hadn’t seen, the first time through, the sculptures in this room, either, next to the window box, the glossy ice formations. How had she missed such beauty?
Her watch said her mother was in the air right now. She’d go back to the house.
You, dear reader, have questions, don’t you? Who is the woman? How old is she? Where exactly is she? A tundra? A tundra of frozen shacks with small doors? Is she even wearing boots? I’ll try to answer. In some ways the woman is me, but she’s too young, isn’t she, worrying about a mother that died fifteen years ago, died then at over eighty? In other ways the woman is my daughter, back East in all the snow, sealed into her apartment for days and marveling over the formations of ice over her plants and deck chairs. The mother in the air would in that case be me because I often fly out to see her, to see my daughter, except not this weekend.
The anxiety is surely my own because it hovers always in one disguise or another, here a mother in the air, unsettled. The ice and snow should be fearful but they are not; they are beautiful discoveries in little rooms; they are what I wasn’t aware of at first. I like to think that those rooms of ice and snow are my writing. It’s easy to walk by the small door and not see it at all, hidden as it is by something else, but once inside, well, there it is: a discovery I hadn’t considered, hadn’t imagined before.
But entering doors of frozen rooms was my dream last night, and the door was this morning’s prompt, There are no end of small doors, really.
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
How would she reach her mother? How would she let her know that there would be someone waiting to pick her up in the ice and snow so the woman wouldn’t be anxious? The phone number was back at the house, back at a house, maybe hers, and she didn’t have a copy of it, nor any way of returning in the snow, which was thick, but pleasant, too, really. Her mother was part of some shared-number cooperative and there was no way of calling and asking about it either. Well, they would be there. She and someone else, a man.
The third door was open as she approached, blocked by a great wedge of ribbed ice, as though a cascade of water had tumbled upon itself and froze just like that. She slid her shovel, a shovel now flat and silver and sleek as the spatula I use for getting salmon off the grill—only larger, of course—under the great wedge and moved it, in its completeness, out of the doorway. The window in the room also had a frozen overspill, much like a window box hanging into the room, thick with frozen symmetrical modules, and at first she turned the shovel over to perhaps hack at it, to knock it down and push it from the room, but then she noticed the beauty of the ice here, too, too beautiful to push aside, to destroy. She’d leave it that way, although god knows how they’d manage around it. Maybe others would admire it, too. She marveled that she hadn’t seen, the first time through, the sculptures in this room, either, next to the window box, the glossy ice formations. How had she missed such beauty?
Her watch said her mother was in the air right now. She’d go back to the house.
You, dear reader, have questions, don’t you? Who is the woman? How old is she? Where exactly is she? A tundra? A tundra of frozen shacks with small doors? Is she even wearing boots? I’ll try to answer. In some ways the woman is me, but she’s too young, isn’t she, worrying about a mother that died fifteen years ago, died then at over eighty? In other ways the woman is my daughter, back East in all the snow, sealed into her apartment for days and marveling over the formations of ice over her plants and deck chairs. The mother in the air would in that case be me because I often fly out to see her, to see my daughter, except not this weekend.
The anxiety is surely my own because it hovers always in one disguise or another, here a mother in the air, unsettled. The ice and snow should be fearful but they are not; they are beautiful discoveries in little rooms; they are what I wasn’t aware of at first. I like to think that those rooms of ice and snow are my writing. It’s easy to walk by the small door and not see it at all, hidden as it is by something else, but once inside, well, there it is: a discovery I hadn’t considered, hadn’t imagined before.
But entering doors of frozen rooms was my dream last night, and the door was this morning’s prompt, There are no end of small doors, really.
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
A Small Door - Maria Robinson
There was a small door in the back of Andre's white stone villa. It was off the garden and fed into the pantry. The door frame was tear-shaped as were many windows in Morocco. Andre had learned that it was once the "ice door", for the bricks of ice that the rich Tangerois , natives of Tanger, had brought in for parties, and used to make ices and drinks.
Lying in his Paris convalescent home, he thought back on the years he'd spent in North Africa, the glittering years of the French Embassy parties, his wives and mistresses, the food. The stable influence in his life had always been Farid, with his watery hazel eyes that reflected the water and his wit which always calmed him. Twice a year, Farid's mother, Zohra, came down from the Rif and lived with them for a month, bleaching the linens and making couscous and fragrant tagines speckled with lemons and onions and fennel. It was the memories of those meals and of fat lingering days that held them, that made Andre want to continue to live.
Lying in his Paris convalescent home, he thought back on the years he'd spent in North Africa, the glittering years of the French Embassy parties, his wives and mistresses, the food. The stable influence in his life had always been Farid, with his watery hazel eyes that reflected the water and his wit which always calmed him. Twice a year, Farid's mother, Zohra, came down from the Rif and lived with them for a month, bleaching the linens and making couscous and fragrant tagines speckled with lemons and onions and fennel. It was the memories of those meals and of fat lingering days that held them, that made Andre want to continue to live.
15 - Camilla Basham
The funny thing about driving your car off a cliff
I bet you’re still hitting those damn brakes.
No matter how messed up it is
You’re programmed to hang onto it.
You know that actor dude who OD’d to kill himself:
the one who was supposedly screwing the Olsen twin?
I bet he ended up dying with one hand on 911,
the other one jammed down his skinny throat.
Even Moose, our soccer team’s answer to God,
When he finally dumped his cheating girlfriend
He ended up sitting outside her house
with a hard on smoking indo;
His dad’s shotgun riding shotgun
in a broken down sedan.
But, he didn’t do anything.
He just set there in the fog
Under some flickering street light
Listening to Muse.
Hard to let go.
Hard to release the brake.
Just as hard to hit the gas.
Parents tell you to coast.
Were they really ever 15?
No matter how messed up it is
You’re programmed to hang onto it.
You know that actor dude who OD’d to kill himself:
the one who was supposedly screwing the Olsen twin?
I bet he ended up dying with one hand on 911,
the other one jammed down his skinny throat.
Even Moose, our soccer team’s answer to God,
When he finally dumped his cheating girlfriend
He ended up sitting outside her house
with a hard on smoking indo;
His dad’s shotgun riding shotgun
in a broken down sedan.
But, he didn’t do anything.
He just set there in the fog
Under some flickering street light
Listening to Muse.
Hard to let go.
Hard to release the brake.
Just as hard to hit the gas.
Parents tell you to coast.
Were they really ever 15?
15 - Corii Liau
“What does it mean to you,” she asked him, “being No.15?”
I couldn’t answer her. Even if I hadn’t been distracted by her odd and direct manner, the fact that she was wearing a bright red color on her lips that dangerously exposed both her and me in the gray, anonymous street, and the throbbing, leaden pain in my knee where I’d fallen the night before—even without all these things, what would I have said anyway?
I had no idea why I was No.15, who decided I would be No.15, and what the future of No.15 was even supposed to look like.
She was attacking me with this question, and yet she did it in so righteous a manner that I couldn’t help but feel that she was trying to help me. I think, in the bleak shades of my years living in Neuenstadt, any attention that any one of us gave to another person living there, was so unexpected, so startling, that it seemed like an overture of love.
I think that day, when she asked me the question, her white face turned up against the sodden air and spotlighting me with those eyes, I think I imagined a future where No.15 would love and be loved.
I couldn’t answer her. Even if I hadn’t been distracted by her odd and direct manner, the fact that she was wearing a bright red color on her lips that dangerously exposed both her and me in the gray, anonymous street, and the throbbing, leaden pain in my knee where I’d fallen the night before—even without all these things, what would I have said anyway?
I had no idea why I was No.15, who decided I would be No.15, and what the future of No.15 was even supposed to look like.
She was attacking me with this question, and yet she did it in so righteous a manner that I couldn’t help but feel that she was trying to help me. I think, in the bleak shades of my years living in Neuenstadt, any attention that any one of us gave to another person living there, was so unexpected, so startling, that it seemed like an overture of love.
I think that day, when she asked me the question, her white face turned up against the sodden air and spotlighting me with those eyes, I think I imagined a future where No.15 would love and be loved.
15 - Donna Shomer
‘These children’
we often say.
And we mean entire encyclopedias of feeling,
universes of experience.
But they are snowflakes, unique specs.
They share genre,
maybe the specificity of desire.
My daughter sidles up to her mirror
Brandishing that damnable eyeliner
But as she touches it to her left eye…
…I sidle up to my mirror.
My mother watches me
struggle to get these lines straight.
we often say.
And we mean entire encyclopedias of feeling,
universes of experience.
But they are snowflakes, unique specs.
They share genre,
maybe the specificity of desire.
My daughter sidles up to her mirror
Brandishing that damnable eyeliner
But as she touches it to her left eye…
…I sidle up to my mirror.
My mother watches me
struggle to get these lines straight.
Tigers-John Fetto
They entered as tigers, but fled like lambs, up out of the valley in they had been mistakenly been dropped. Hawley out front, walking to fast, not carefully. It wasn’t his mistake. The pilot’s? Or the staff officer who threw a dart at a map, stroked his chin and thought let’s see what they find there. Four men in, still four men, three behind Hawley, lungs aching to keep up. Behind them down below, bugles blared, summoning troops to chase them, but chase them where? Hawley had broken brush toward the river, then doubled back, leading them up the draw toward, toward a ridge. But beyond the ridge? There was no way of knowing, until he got there, just another hundred yards? More? Dirt sifted under his boots as he climbed. He could see the trees part to show sky. So close. And then the pop of gun fire, crackling like a fresh lit camp fire, slowly, and then rising. He slumped behind a the tree. When he peered around the trunk, he saw no men following. There was no one.
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